Industrial statistics

UNIDO provides technical assistance to introduce best practice methodologies and software systems to monitor and assess productivity performance and use it as a guide for policy-making; and enhance the quality and consistency of the industrial statistics databases so as to provide meaningful inputs for assessing productivity and industrial performance. UNIDO plays a unique role in the international statistics system. It maintains the international industrial statistical databases at different levels of ISIC with worldwide coverage.

Statistical products of UNIDO are widely disseminated through the annual publication of the International Yearbook of Industrial Statistics, production of INDSTAT4, INDSTAT2, MINSTAT, MVA and IDSB databases (both available online and on CD ROMs) and online data portal of the Statistical Country Briefs available on the UNIDO website. These products offer statistical information to a wide range of users including national governments, international development partners, academic research institutions and the business community. Primary importance is given to the quality assurance of statistics, especially in terms of international comparability of data with respect to recommended concepts and definitions, classification and coverage. UNIDO’s Statistics Unit extends technical assistance to developing countries and countries in transition in strengthening technical capacity for conducting industry surveys, maintaining, updating business registers and short-term statistical indicators and carrying out data analysis of industrial performance.

UNIDO’s statistical activities began in 1979 with a project to create a database for the Organization’s research on inter-country economic studies. In subsequent years, UNIDO extended statistical activities to support its research and technical cooperation programme. However, it was heavily dependent on the UN Statistics Division for industrial statistics. In 1993, the UN Statistics Commission gave the mandate for maintaining global industrial statistics to UNIDO, in partnership with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Since then UNIDO has been collecting national data directly from all countries and areas that are not members of OECD, while OECD collects data for its Member States and provides them to UNIDO, in order to complete the global coverage of the latter’s industrial statistics databases.